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MOOD, PROPOSITIONAL ATTITUDES AND
METAREPRESENTATION IN SPANISH
Aoife Ahern, U.N.E.D. aahern@bec.uned.es
Abstract for the International Workshop "Where Semantics Meets Pragmatics"
Michigan State University, July, 11-13, 2003
In this paper I will be considering how the data related to the lexical selection of the indicative and
subjunctive moods in Spanish subordinate clauses reflect aspects of the interaction between
semantics and pragmatics. My proposal consists of a Relevance-theoretically based analysis of
the Spanish subjunctive as a grammatical marker of the meta-representation of propositions,
which affects, inter alia, the interpretively expressed propositions functioning as objects of certain
propositional attitude predicates. This basic, procedural semantic content of the subjunctive
activates a variety of pragmatic assumptions during the interpretation process which correspond
to the diverse communicative purposes that are often mentioned in the explanations found in
traditional grammars of the “meaning” of mood selection and choice in Spanish.
That-clauses have been analysed (Bezuidenhout (2000)) as encoding the procedural
information that they express propositions which bear a relation of interpretive resemblance to the
content of the object of a propositional attitude predicate (OPA). The notion of interpretive use,
as described by Sperber and Wilson (1995: 228) consists of the use of utterances to represent,
not what they describe, but what they resemble. This resemblance relation consists of the
propositions involved sharing some logical properties and giving rise to partly identical contextual
implications. Interpretive use, thus, is a particular kind of metarepresentation: the proposition
consists of a representation that resembles some other representation (for instance, the
speaker’s own (possible/previous) thought, or a thought or utterance the speaker attributes to
some other contextually salient individual) which it is being used to represent.
A noteworthy property of propositional attitude predicates in the Romance languages is
that certain semantically related groups of them select subjunctive arguments. In Spanish, for
instance, these include predicates such as volitional ones (querer, ordenar, pedir - want,
command, request), those known as evaluatives or factive-emotives (lamentar, temerse, asustar
– regret, fear, frighten), negative epistemics (dudar, negar – doubt, deny), as well as other
sentence-embedding predicates like those expressing probability and necessity (necesitar, ser
probable que – need, be probable that). I would like to suggest that, in accordance with
Bezuidenhout’s analysis of the clauses embedded under propositional attitude predicates as
interpretive representations, lexical selection of the subjunctive reflects that these interpretively
used propositions are expressed under an additional layer of metarepresentation.
Therefore, in utterances such as:
1) María quiere que coloquemos sus zapatillas al lado del sillón.
María wants that we-put (pres. subj.) her slippers beside the armchair.
2) Lamentaron que tuvieras que repetir el examen.
They-regretted that you-had (imperf. subj.) to-repeat the exam.
the lexical selection of the subjunctive reflects the fact that the propositional attitudes represented
by predicates such as querer and lamentar can be described as doubly interpretive. Firstly, they
are interpretive by virtue of the fact that they are presented by the speaker as propositions that
resemble, in contextually appropriate ways, the actual OPA as entertained by the subject. In other
words, the speaker of (1) shows her intention, by way of this utterance, that the embedded clause